Thread: best OS suggestions / ease my doubts

Hello,
Just a quickie. We are planning an upgrade from 7.1.3 to 7.3. Since we
have to bring down our production server to do it we are planning on
killing all the birds with one shot. We are running RH 7.1 and were
planning on using RH 8. After reading a little bit recently here and
there and installing RH 8 on a simple mail server, I'm getting a little
nervous.
We have a database dedicated Dell 6450 quad Xeon machine with 6gig ram.
We have had frequent bounce buffer errors and have to run the enterprise
kernal rather than the smp kernel to recognize the full memory with RH
7.1. I realize this is more of an OS question, but I want to provide the
optimal OS environment for our Postgres intallation and you guys are the
most attuned to those issues.
Anyone got any real case based suggestions using similar hardware
config, Postgres 7.3 and a more recent linux?
Many thanks!
--
Bill MacArthur
Webmaster
DHS Club

On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 07:54, DHS Webmaster wrote:
> Just a quickie. We are planning an upgrade from 7.1.3 to 7.3. Since we
> have to bring down our production server to do it we are planning on
> killing all the birds with one shot. We are running RH 7.1 and were
> planning on using RH 8. After reading a little bit recently here and
> there and installing RH 8 on a simple mail server, I'm getting a little
> nervous.

Get more nervous.

Do not ever upgrade more than one component on a production box. There
will be problems, and having multiple changed items will make
troubleshooting a multi-day nightmare. In the end you'll be forced to
back out one of your changes (ie: downgrade PostgreSQL or Redhat).

If you really *MUST* do it all in one downtime, then create an exact
copy of the production machine on a development environment, do the
upgrade there, and run a realistic workload against it using your
applications. You still may regret doing both upgrades at once, but the
possibilities of problems are minimised.

I still say do two downtimes.

--
Tim Ellis
Senior Database Architect and author, tedia2sql (http://tedia2sql.tigris.org)
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